Kitsch versus the avant-garde — Part 3
The Super-man and the Avant-garde
If Marx gives us a left-wing political underpinning to avant-garde art, Nietzsche gives us more of its key themes, that deconstruction may lead to beauty and that there is no truth. Nietzsche is a powerful ally to art-makers in the avant-garde world — first as an enthusiastic supporter of the role of artist as one who celebrates life, regardless of judgment of its failure to offer truth, and secondly because of his dedication to the idea that after we have understood the deep problem of the absence of truth in human experience and made our necessary abandonment of God as a principle, we discover freedom of spirit, and an optimistic, illuminative rebirth into a future released from reliance on unfounded belief.
While Nietzsche is not explicit about what beliefs would replace the sickness of nihilism that confounded Christian faith, he certainly considered nihilism to be a necessary, albeit unpleasant, phase through which the human species must pass on its way to a future in which the affirmation of life as it is truly experienced becomes the foundation of its culture — without meaningless adherence to religion, or God, which offer incorrect and misleading ideas about reality. After the uncertainty caused by the death of god, we recognize that “we’re all in it together”, and humankind embraces itself as the provider of the comfort we once found in the open arms of the gods. Nietzsche said that although Christian values had been called into doubt and this uncertainty made the universe appear meaningless, “that is only a transitional stage” that would be remedied if only individual humans would say the big “Yes” of self-affirmation, re-inventing Plato’s platitude to know thyself, and finding freedom from the tyranny of lies that are the structure of religion and ideological dominance. He insists on saying “yes” to everything, beyond good or evil, accepting life exactly as it is experienced, not as it should be experienced according to the false moral system inherited from our misguided Christian past. Nietzsche’s response to nihilism is a radical individualism, in which the ideal man is driven by his will to power, leading to a competitive culture of dominance. Beauty, goodness, and truth are all meaningless lies propped up by centuries of necessity as a means of assuring the survival of the species. He wrote: “Thus the beautiful and the ugly are recognized as relative to our most fundamental values of preservation. It is senseless to want to posit anything as beautiful or ugly apart from this. The beautiful exists just as little as does the good, or the true.”
As for the truth, it was a conglomeration of convenient lies:
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
Nietzsche was absolutely right in his description of the way mind evolves — he described the mind as an “immense framework and planking of concepts” — but he recommended destroying the framework and hoping to make intuitive reconstructions of the fragments as the road to becoming the overman, because it is “…nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect.” His idea that we should break down the concepts we slowly build as our minds develop suggests that we can somehow dispose of that framework and do without it. But a building with no framework falls down, and the overman becomes a tyrant. This is an appeal to mindlessness at worst and domination at best. Where are these audacious feats, achieved by liberating the mind from the pernicious effects of its natural evolution toward complexity and emergence? What are their achievements? Are the broken remnants of punk or Dadaist performances the best offer of the postmodernists against the stimulation of the renaissance?
Nietzsche’s rejection of consistent truth takes him on a path to profound relativism and potentially to a refuge in solipsism — the idea that your own existence is the only thing you can know, everything else is questionable, interpretable according to your own priorities and perceptions. Here then, are the roots of an infectious and convincing avant-gardist relativism.
Nietzsche’s is a view of reality that depends upon reductive thinking — looking inward and down to seek out a truthful, but limited description of human experience. But the evolutionary mind isn’t alone — it acts with other minds, in our shared experience of being. And the mind is in constant evolution within the physiology of the human body, with all the sensory experiences and emotions that go along with being human. Rational thought is but one of the elements of the complex system that produces mind. Examining rational thought as if it alone would give us a comprehensive understanding of the mind is like looking at hydrogen with the expectation that it would give us a complete picture of the dynamics of wetness. Rational thought is an element of the emergent mind, but so are sensory perception, mental categorization, emotions, and physiological chemistry.
Although sensual and appealing to our individual desires for self-fulfillment, the will to individual power as an escape from solipsism neglects completely the fundamental physiological human urge to find unity with a partner, to join with another, to find a mate and procreate as participants in the evolutionary journey of humanity through time, which by necessity is supremely co-operative. And this fundamental shared experience is so basic to human life that it permeates our social actions, which are and always have been collaborative and co-operative. Physiology and mind are parallel in this relationship, for the creation of culture and the creation of children are both dependent upon the meeting of one with another: one mind with another mind, one body with another body. We have evolved physiological and cultural interactions between individuals as a tool for survival. The human mind has evolved as a profoundly useful and effective means for the success of our species — it means that ideas that are effective and collectively liked for their usefulness, or efficacy, and may continue after the death of the individuals sharing them. We don’t have to reinvent our understanding of the world with each individual birth.
Nietzsche’s relativism became thematic to artists concerned with avant-gardist ideas, assuming an apocalyptic view of the world as broken, where there are no “meta-narratives”, by which postmodernists mean that national and cultural ideologies are meaningless. As a result, much postmodern art and literature is subversive, suspicious of the benevolence of governments, skeptical of truth, goodness, and beauty. Following Nietzsche, avant-garde art must be ironic and cast doubt upon such ideas. The discomfort people feel when confronted with the dystopian excess of much postmodern art is the result of their disagreement with the superficial nihilistic ideology of avant-gardist artists who fail to transcend Nietzsche’s thinking, who fail to include the empathy of human relationships and their necessity to evolution.
